At rotor standstill or low speed there is insufficient back electromotive force (EMF) generated in a dynamoelectric machine to enable an accurate estimate of rotor position using only passive measurement of terminal potentials and currents. Some means must be provided to stimulate the machine in order to extract rotor position information. Many alternative schemes have been reported in the technical literature over the years.
Stimulation can be applied to either the rotor or the stator, it can be either transient or continuous, and it may be of different frequencies. Nonetheless, all the reported approaches require some means to stimulate the machine and some means to interpret or demodulate the stimulation response in order to provide an estimate of the rotor position. One advantageous approach is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,585,709 by Jansen et al., herein incorporated by reference.
Jansen et al. describes a carrier injection sensorless (CIS) method of estimating the position and velocity of the rotor of a dynamoelectric machine. CIS works by applying a high frequency excitation signal with an electrical current or potential rotating waveform to the dynamoelectric machine at a high enough frequency that it sweeps around the stator faster than the rotor is turning, thus “viewing” the rotor from all angles. This “viewing” is manifested in measuring the resulting rotating current or potential waveform, which contains information about the rotor due to rotor position dependent differences in the equivalent magnetic circuit of the dynamoelectric machine.
If the rotating current waveform at the machine terminals is transformed to its stationary two axis equivalent (αβ) and x-y plotted, a non-circular orbit is seen that rotates with the rotor. This is the electromagnetic image of the dynamoelectric machine and in general, each machine has its own unique image. This technique works with any dynamoelectric machine that has rotor saliencies that result in a change in impedance as seen at the stator windings to the high frequency excitation signal.
Although the CIS technique described in Jansen et al. allows estimation of the position of a rotor pole, either “north” or “south”, it does not inherently allow the determination of which pole's position is estimated. This could give rise to 180 electrical degree errors in position estimation, and such error can be very undesirable.